100,000 parents in Australia suffer from perinatal depression and anxiety (PNDA) every year. That’s 1 in every 5 new mums and 1 in every 10 new dads. For many sufferers, their inner turmoil and sadness will be experienced undiagnosed, unnoticed, and unreported.

Gidget Foundation Australia is a small Sydney-based not-for-profit organisation that supports the emotional wellbeing of expectant and new parents to ensure that those in need receive timely, appropriate and supportive care. Their mission, and our brief, was to start the PNDA conversation at a broader, national level. The more people we could encourage to talk, the better.

But with an effective budget of zero, we needed to think beyond traditional marketing and be truly inventive in our approach.

PNDA is an illness that is suffered in silence, and people often shut the world out rather than seeking help. Often the only person they regularly talk to is their baby, so this is where we saw an opportunity to help.

Introducing ‘Bunny Books’. A set of four bedtime storybooks for little ones, which double as parental self-help books to tackle common symptoms of PNDA. Each Bunny Book is a cognitive behavioural exercise wrapped up as a simple, engaging story. The books are designed to capture baby’s attention in colourful images, and then gently deliver messages through the story that resonate with the parent. The final message is an invitation to speak with GFA directly for more support.

The books are both a powerful new communication tool and a new fundraising channel for Gidget Foundation Australia.

The quality of the content, the experience and the finished product were all paramount to success.

Carefully crafted in conjunction with GP’s, obstetricians and GFA’s psychologists, each story puts proven psychological strategies between the lines for the reader to address different symptoms of PNDA; such as insomnia, low motivation, anxiety and panic. Each book then directs readers to its own psychologist-led online film, exploring the symptoms and strategies in depth.

The stories are beautifully illustrated to appeal to both baby and parent, and printed as a box set of four in a compact format that makes them easy to use and ideal as a gift.

The books were launched with a PR campaign on World Maternal Mental Health Day, and subsequently followed up with direct conversations with retailers, hospitals, pharmacy chains and corporate partners to build distribution.

For a small not-for-profit, the impact of Bunny Books has already been enormous, delivering across a range of metrics:

- Reach: 8 million earned media impressions

- 88,000 books sold

- $308,000 funds raised (50% increase in funding)

- 70% increase in clinical referrals for treatment

But this is just the start, with distribution of the books continuing to spread. It’s now stocked in Australia’s leading bookstore chain, provided as a gift to every new mum in maternity wards at a range of hospitals, given out at anti-natal classes, and given as a maternity leave gift by corporates.

The true impact in the long term is hard to quantify, but indications are that the innovative idea of Bunny Books has sparked a rush of interest that will change the course of GFA in the years ahead, and start hundreds of thousands of important conversations about this silent but tragic illness.